


decay mode

by Avonya



Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool (Movieverse), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Mentioned team red, Mentions of Death, POV third person Peter Parker, Peter’s not like other teens: he’s also got a lot in common with Chernobyl, basically a, lots of introspection, ruminations on the lifespan of a superhero, team Actual Radiation, thinking deeply about one’s own death, this isn’t as dark as that sounds but it’s still fairly angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 17:38:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19233934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avonya/pseuds/Avonya
Summary: half-life/ˈhaf ˌlīf/nounthe time taken for the radioactivity of a specified isotope to fall to half its original value.What’s the half life of a superhero?





	decay mode

**Author's Note:**

> Hey y’all! A quick content note: this work talks about death and the reality of how pressing it is for superheroes. Like, a lot. That’s kind of the premise of the fic. That said, if there’s any tags I should add PLEASE tell me!
> 
> Enjoy the fic!

What’s the half life of a superhero? How long does it take for one to decay into nothing, bit by bit, piece by piece?

 

Peter knows that he’s going to burn out one day. He started too early, that’s it, his reaction began before anyone is ready and time isn’t kind to anyone. 

 

There’s this thing about half lives: you can’t change them. A half life is the set amount of time it takes a certain number of particles in a radioactive element to lose half of its mass. It will decay at its own rate, thank you very much, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. 

 

Peter’s pretty sure Matt will go first though. He’s like iodine, except his timeline is uncertain. Maybe he has months, maybe weeks, maybe days, but bit by bit half of him will be gone, and then half of that, and then half of that. Matt’s not like Peter, he doesn’t have the benefit of super strength or super speed or super stickiness or anything, all he has are his child-soldier instincts and his radar senses to keep him safe. He laughs when bullets graze him, he runs on broken ankles, and he goes to church the next day with foundation over his bruises. 

 

Matt’s one of Peter’s best friends. He’s a mentor. He taught Peter how to punch good and how to block so he didn’t need to get punched in the first place. He helped Peter through one of his worst panic attacks and brought him a soda afterwards. 

 

Matt is a good man. That doesn’t mean the Peter wasn’t surprised when he dies. Matt had sworn he dropped the lifestyle, but he didn’t, which was really no surprise because once you’re in you’re  _ in.  _ Peter had hoped that one day Matt’s explosive, radioactive self would transmogrify into something like lead. Sure, still technically poisonous, but not as extreme. Instead of lawyer by day and vigilante by night (and sometimes also day), maybe just lawyer by day and late evening and vigilante by an hour after sunset. 

 

The worst part of all of it was not getting to go to a funeral, because Matt didn’t even  _ get  _ a funeral, because all of them had to pretend he was still alive and had just fucked off to warmer waters or something. 

 

It turned out that Matt wasn’t dead at all, just super fucked up, and that wasn’t really surprising either. Superheroes can’t die until they finally do, bloodily, messily, dashed onto the rocks of the city they protected. 

 

(Peter wonders when he’ll die. He wonders where. He hoped that it’ll be in Queens, but with his luck it’ll probably happen in  _ Brooklyn _ .)

  
  
  


Some elements take for-fucking-ever to decay. Longer than a natural human life, that’s for sure. 

 

Wade’s like Uranium. He will live and live and live. One day he’ll watch Peter die, or maybe he’ll have dropped their whole ‘team’ by then. Peter hopes he won’t. 

 

Peter likes Wade. Wade’s a good person, even when he pretends that he’s not. He takes bullets and knives for his weaker teammates, he carries them to their special secret doctors. He tried to help Peter on his History homework once. It was something about recent-ish events, Peter can’t quite remember, but it ended with Wade unable to continue in his exasperation and realization that Peter wasn’t even  _ alive  _ in the 90’s, saying, ‘seriously, what the fuck? You’re a baby!’.

  
  
  


Peter’s got more in common with Chernobyl than the average American teen. 

 

He’s got radiation in him, for one. Lots of it. Once in Chemistry, his teacher showed the class a Geiger counter, a device that measures radioactivity. They all oohed and ahhed at the baseline radioactivity in the air, and at the little carefully contained samples their teacher had packed away. The Geiger counter lost its shit when the teacher swept it across the classroom, though. It went crazy when it was even in Peter’s direction. Teacher thought it was broken, nothing actually traced back to Peter, so all was good and well, but still. 

 

Peter doesn’t think he’ll be able to go on airplanes, but he also doesn’t think he ever  _ will _ , so it all evens out.  

 

They learned that the Chernobyl nuclear core, the absolute epicenter of where shit went down, had been encased in a tomb of steel and concrete to keep it contained. Nothing they can do but cover it up, so the officials didn’t have to see the mess they made. 

 

That’s another thing Peter has in common with Chernobyl: covered in a sarcophagus, left to decay. 

 

Peter didn’t like to think about that part. 

  
  
  


The older generation of superheroes (or at least the original Avengers) all seem like they’ll last forever until you know them and see that one, two, three, half lives have passed already. How much is left? How much did they start with? How long does it take for one to pass?

 

Peter can find out all of those things when he’s got the facts laid out in front of him. In Chemistry, they learned to set up a table. In one column goes the time passed (in whatever units that is), in another the number of half lives, with the remaining mass in the last column. 

 

But mass isn’t accurate when you’re dealing with the half life of a superhero, so maybe just ‘life’ is a better label. 

 

Results of Peter’s mathematics are inconclusive. 

 

Bruce’s on team Actual Radiation and probably has an Actual, numerical, half life. 

 

Clint’s just a guy with a bow. He’s good at it, obviously, but there’s no enhancements there. Maybe fifteen years left. 

 

Natasha’s Very Cool. Of all of the Avengers, she’s the one that Peter thinks could possibly be immortal (excluding Thor, who’s a god), she’s That Cool. Natasha will still be kicking ass on planet earth when the sarcophagus is lifted from Chernobyl **.**

 

Steve’s old, really old, but that means nothing for half lives. He’s also stubborn enough that one day it’ll end him. Peter’s also pretty sure Steve’s on team Actual Radiation too, which again means nothing. 

 

Tony. Tony’s old, and that actually means something for him because he’s just human. He’s an amazing man, but his core is human even if his heart is a nuclear reactor. Tony’s on team Actual Radiation, but everything Peter’s read about him makes it seem like all of that’s gone and down with. 

 

(Peter doesn’t want to know how much time Tony has left. 

 

But if he had to put a number on it, then maybe fifteen years too.)

  
  
  


When he tells his theories to Ned and MJ, they more or less gently tell him that it’s probably unhealthy to think so much about the time of death for you and yours, but he still thinks them. 

 

After all. A half life is fixed. Nothing can speed the process up, and nothing can slow it down. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> does this count as studying for chem? 
> 
> had to break away from the convention of summarizing fics like “quote from fic” (one or two line summary) so I fell back on a different naming trope lol
> 
> There’s a line in here that’s super inspired by deniigiq’s fics, and of you haven’t read those already, you’re missing out. 
> 
> Comments fuel me, so tell me what you think!


End file.
